I may have abandoned this blog, but I still use the sidebar and archives.

Saturday, September 03, 2005

Teachable moments indeed

Good advice/analysis from Evan Kirchhoff on Friday night. The last of the following excerpts might be controversial; I find it intuitively obvious, and probably a good topic for a future post. Anyway, One:

Your mileage may vary, but the phrase "place my life in their hands" is not the first thing I associate with "San Francisco city councillor". It probably can't be stated too often that you need more food and water in your house than you likely have right now.

Two:

I believe, to the same degree that I did last week, that it's mostly a good thing that the President can't immediately and unilaterally pour large numbers of machine-gun-toting troops into the center of my city. I would think that people who attribute actual malice to the federal government, as opposed to just stock levels of institutional semi-competence, would be a whole lot less willing than I am to argue for such powers.

and Three:

I also hope this disaster has underlined the importance of private vehicle ownership; even a bicycle seems like it would be infinitely better than nothing. I support public transportation as a subsidy to people who can't drive for economic or physical reasons, and as a necessary method of getting an extra million daily office workers into the cores of the old, dense cities I prefer to live in for aesthetic reasons. But the notion that a middle-class person riding a bus or train embodies some additional civic virtue -- that we should, as this city's government keeps suggesting, actually close some downtown streets and impose London-style tolls and eliminate parkades to reduce the number of cars in the city, making tens of thousands of additional people into de facto wards of the state -- embodies an appalling contempt for individual lives.

To channel the Instapundit: "Balance is required, but let's hope this point is noted in the weeks and months ahead."